Carrying containers are made of flexible or rigid materials and come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and descriptions for serving a wide variety of purposes. The term “carrying container” as used herein, refers generally to but is not limited to luggage, suitcases, briefcases, attaché or sample cases, backpacks, handbags, sample cases, pocketbooks, shoulder bags, diaper bags, and/or purses.
With advances in technology, portable electronic devices such as phones, tablets and laptops have become prevalent in daily use. These are carried along with personal items such as makeup, wallets, pens, documents, money, credit cards, and keys, both in personal and professional carrying containers.
Though convenient and often indispensable, the electronic devices together with personal items carried can comprise a significant weight. Thus the weight of the carrying container itself is of importance to users of such carrying containers.
Therefore, components added to a carrying container as integral parts of such a container, must be as lightweight as possible.
The increase in the variety of items carried has served to increase the difficulty faced by users of carrying containers in attempting to locate any particular item within the interior of a carrying container. Moreover, the access opening of a carrying container is not sufficiently large to enable an adequate amount of ambient light to illuminate the objects randomly dispersed within the carrying container.
Thus, even when the carrying container is in the wide open position, the light directed into the interior of the carrying container is usually insufficient to illuminate the items piled upon each other inside the carrying container, particularly when the surrounding available light is substantially diminished due to the absence of sun or artificial light.
Therefore, finding a desired article may require the user to open the carrying container and blindly shuffle through the contents until the form of the desired item is felt. Given this lack of visual acuity, a significant time delay may be encountered when attempting to identify and retrieve an object, which in some circumstances may present a significant concern relative to safety.
Conventionally, the lack of illumination has been addressed by adding a single light source inside a carrying container.
Examples of these conventional devices are set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 7,178,936; U.S. Pat. No. 7,111,959; U.S. Pat. No. 6,848,808; U.S. Pat. No. 6,824,291; U.S. Pat. No. 6,447,142; U.S. Pat. No. 6,120,162; U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,057; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,239,658. The entire contents of U.S. Pat. No. 7,178,936; U.S. Pat. No. 7,111,959; U.S. Pat. No. 6,848,808; U.S. Pat. No. 6,824,291; U.S. Pat. No. 6,447,142; U.S. Pat. No. 6,120,162; U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,057; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,239,658 are hereby incorporated by reference.
Such conventional devices which do provide for multiple light sources within a single lighting system built into a carrying container and activated by magnetic actuators, require the number of such magnetic actuators to equal the number of light sources to operatively engage the light sources, since each magnetic actuator is physically attached to the carrying container in a manner which limits its reach to one specific actuation sensing device.
Therefore, a lighting system coupled to such a container, whereby all magnetic actuators are removable from the carrying container, allowing for a single actuator to activate all light sources in the lighting system, would be advantageous as the overall weight of the carrying container would be reduced.
Moreover, a lighting system wherein all components can be optionally substituted to ones best suited to a given user or application, would be desirable. Such substitution could include the use of highly sensitive actuation sensing devices or magnetic sensors requiring low strength magnetic actuators to operate, or employing light sources such as light emitting diodes, electroluminescent flexible panels or other low power light sources.
In addition, in instances where the application of the carrying container is such that multiple magnetic actuators would not present a danger to the user, a lighting system allowing for such magnetic actuators to optionally be mounted to the carrying container by means of a switch, would allow greater adaptability of the system to such an application.
The flexibility of the above described lighting system allows it to be coupled to other items for illuminating areas where lighting is desired or necessary and can provide safety illumination for the purpose of avoiding a situation in which the lack of illumination could bring harm to the user.